Text Messaging Featured Article

Text Messaging to Customers Guarantees a Captive Audience

According to recent reports, text message spam has jumped 45 percent in the last year to a total of over 4.5 billion unwanted messages. However, according to a blog post on MobileMarketingWatch.com, text messaging to customers is like parenting a teenager. Even if they don’t really want to hear from you, your customers still need to be reminded of your existence.

For many businesses, immediate communication with customers is seen as critical to success. Instead of sending customers important messages in their email inbox where those messages can easily either end up in a junk folder or be deleted, companies should deploy text messaging. When a customer checks his or her mobile phone, the customer has to give the company a few moments of attention before choosing whether to keep or delete the text.

Text messaging is also a secure way to transmit a one-time password or other piece of personal data to a customer. The text can be immediately deleted so that no record of the password remains. Because the message didn’t come through the email server, recipients never have to worry that an unauthorized person has viewed a sensitive message.

In addition to its marketing utility, text messaging has applications for companies beyond the scope of marketing. Text messaging can also be crucial to mobilizing large numbers of employees at once. Sending out a bulk text message with login information for a video conference, for instance, saves the time and hassle of calling each individual participant while guaranteeing that the message immediately gets to each person.

M2M communications also provides an opportunity to take advantage of text messaging. Often, devices on a network need to send short bursts of data to one another, but that large barrage of small messages can tie up space on the network. When machines can communicate with each other with SMS, the network can operate much more efficiently.

Email continues to be the cheapest channel for communicating with customers, but text messaging has grown rapidly in popularity. As with any form of communication, balancing respect for the recipient’s time and providing the recipient with something of major benefit will ensure that a company’s messages remain welcome on a customer’s mobile phone.

Like parents of teenagers, companies need to send messages that are short, valuable and to-the-point. Customers, like teenagers, may really welcome those messages, whether or not they choose to admit it.

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